The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs are scrapping their joint effort to create an Integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR) system by 2017, after spending about $1 billion on the project. The iEHR was previously lauded by VA and DoD as a solution to the ongoing problem of incompatibility between the two departments' electronic health record systems (VA's VISTA and DoD's ALTA). James E. Koutz, national commander of The American Legion, said, "... our veterans are the real losers in this decision. Without a joint DoD-VA record that is easy to access, veterans have to ask for copies, and those requests often take months to process."